A turn-based grand strategy game in space: Defend Earth against an alien invasion from the edge of the Solar System. Negotiate with the various governments of Earth and secure their support - One way or the other. Establish your bases on other planets to take the fight to the enemy. Design and build powerful spaceships, then take them into battle.

With the 1.00 release coming up soon, I have opened up the character creator one last time. Through this, you can design your own character to be added to Solar War. This feature is available to everyone who bought or still buys the game before the release.

Since this was originally promised as a bonus for Alpha users only, Beta customers will only have 35 character points available to build their character instead the the 50 Alpha users get. Alpha characters also get a special trait that reduces promotion cost by 5 experience points.

To get started, hit the "Connect" menu item on the Desura page for the game and follow the instructions. Once you are done, you can start picking the stats for your in-game persona at Solarwar.net

Once you have finished making your officer character, it will be included in the game starting from the next released update (possibly excepting minor bugfix updates ending with a letter).

Connecting your Desura copy of the game to the Solar War site also gives you instant access to the latest standalone installers for the Windows and Linux versions of the game.

I haven't found much time to work on the game lately. There's still a few balance changes I'd like to add, as well as fixing a few oddities on the tech side. I'd like the next update to be the 1.00 release, or something very close to that. No ETA though.

Really excellent game. Had tons of fun with it. There are a few issues I'd like to discuss though.

First off, missions and mission penalties. It's been mentioned before, but the penalty stacking is horrible and makes the game incredibly stressful at the start. Getting a base on the moon is easy, but 6 months to get a outpost on Mars? Which is guarded by a Starbase? And a while after that you recieve a mission to take Jupiter all of a sudden? I had a tremendously difficult time at the start of the game dealing with the constant light cruisers and trying to establish a foothold on the various moons and planets in order to complete the missions. After you've taken Jupiter though, you stop recieving missions at all, and there are no varieties on missions so far either.

Secondly, the slow and awkward start of the game. You spend a long time just chilling at home on Earth and researching stuff. It takes quite some time for you to get going, and it feels incredibly odd that you have two ship classes, fighters and corvettes, who aren't used at all in the game. In fact, why are they even there?

Thirdly, the combat. More sprites would be absolutely great, but the one thing that annoyed me the most was the lack of feedback regarding damage. Beams are better against shields from what I understand, and ballistic weapons are far better against structure and armor, but there was a lack of feedback regarding this, and I'm still confused regarding which weapons you should use.

Finally, more structured UI and more explanatory tooltips. When designing a ship, make objects you can fit on your ship green in the list, so you know what you can safely add instead of doing a quick comparison. Objects which are red cannot be fitted, and yellow objects can be used, but will cause heat issues.

Game's great, but I see the game being even more great if these issues were adressed.

The trick to the Mars mission is to figure out how to efficiently kill a Starbase, which is more about your weapon choice than number of ships.

Here's a big hint: You have one class of weapons which has mostly awesome stats, were it not for that terrible accuracy and trouble getting through shields... and a Starbase can neither dodge your shots nor use shields. Though I'll see about putting that an an in-game hint soon.

Fighters and Corvettes exists mostly for story reasons as a reasonable ground launched ship for the first battle.

Some sort of highlighting of modules that fit your design in the ship designer is a good idea.

Ok got a good play in and I have to say I am impressed. I like the gameplay for the mostpart but a few things really need to be adressed. and i know this is a beta and its a long way from final ballancing but you really really need to take another look at mission penalties. I thought that if i failled to do a mission in the alotted time it would give me a one time negative mark on my review or maybe a short period of negative influence like 5-6 reviews worth. Not only did the negative marks stack they persist until you complete the objective. The mission in particular that i was up against was the mars takeover mission which had a starbase on it that obliterated 2 LCs 1DD and 2FFs in a single turn, leaving me with nothing but one DD. Yeah that was the point I rage quit. I think you should allow transplanetary travel at the DD level it would go a long way to helping with the early game and wouldnt leave you reasearching half the tree while waiting to do anything more than sit there waiting to get killed.

The only other thing I thought needed work was the ship icons. You really need to have different ones for the two species and whats better they could be in full color if you couldnt mistake them with the enemies!

I do have a few suggestions for you that arent something you have to fix like the above two.

I love this campaign its awesome! BUT you should see about expanding the game map a little to nearby earth systems. To be honest it really does not make sense that a species has to have warp drive to tool around their own star system. (Fusion drive would have about the same level of effect your warp drive does as far as moving around a star system)

Making fighters relavent to late game and adding in carriers that can spawn them would be a nice touch but its not necessary.

The main unit balance doesn't work with DD being able to travel between planets: At that tech level the CLs are filling a carrier role: With bad firepower/cost ratio by themselves, but needed to get your actual combat units to where they should go. Just think of your Destroyers as really, really big fighters. Basically, your fleet should have as few CLs and as many DDs and FFs as possible to get the most bang for your buck.

Sorry, I don't have the money to buy any new graphics. (And the game hasnt't sold nearly enough copies to fund it off that, which was my original idea for the beta)

Here's some free back story: The warp drive in this game becomes both slower and much less efficient when far away from an anchoring gravity well like the Sun. That's also the idea behind the roughly spiral shaped trajectory your ships take. To travel between systems in less than decades you need a different drive system. Like the one the Alien Mothership has. ;-)

I am currently uploading it, after which it will have to be approved. There were two big problems with the initial 0.90 release, which required a 0.90a and 0.90b before they were completely fixed. That's why I didn't have time to upload it here yet.

If you want a new release the moment it's out, you can always use the Connect feature up in the menu bar to get an account at my own site.